A Funeral in Bahrain

Bahraini security forces are shooting tear gas and live rounds on pro-democracy protesters in Manama today. At least fifty people have been injured in tonight’s crackdown, and a total of eight have been reported killed this week.

Meanwhile, in Sitra, south of Manama, a mixture of chanting and mourning filled the streets this afternoon for Bahrain’s fourth day of pro-democracy protests. In the heat of the sun, children, women, and a swell of Bahraini men glistened with sweat. Many of them were crying, mourning the five slain on Thursday when security raided Manama’s Pearl Roundabout before dawn. Periodically, water bottles were passed out to the crowd, as young boys ran into the dirt fields to catch up with a pickup truck carrying men who guided the crowd with chants: “Praise be to God, the matrys are beloved by God.”

Though shouts of “Down with Khalifa” spread through the streets, several Bahrainis I spoke to said that they want King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa and the royal family to stay in Bahrain—but primarily as figureheads. They repeated the protesters’ demand for a constitutional monarchy, similar to the United Kingdom’s system. Each protester I spoke to, Sunni and Shiite alike, said that since Thursday’s raid they regarded their demands as points of utter necessity. One was that Khalifa ibn Salman Al Khalifa, prime minister for more than thirty years and uncle of King Hamid, should resign and be tried, along with the security forces, for human-rights violations.

From the back of a truck, a political leader from the leftist opposition Wa’ad party spoke to the crowd. “Why are they using force? Because they know they are weak politically,” he said. “They are now going to the venue of politics, to bring it down. Don’t let anyone take your demands away!” Members of the Shiite-led Wefaq party, which holds eighteen of the forty seats in Bahrain’s imperfect Parliament, pulled out of the legislature Tuesday after the first two killings by the security forces. Women also gathered behind the trail of men, chanting “Down with the regime,” with protest signs displaying images of the dead.

From every corner of the funeral crowd, people were calling for the government to stop giving citizenship to members of the country’s police force, who they say are largely Yemeni, Syrian, Jordanian, and Pakistani. They spoke of how the government seemed to be bringing in Sunni foreigners as security personnel, to increase the Sunni population and to make the police primarily loyal to the royal family, which, unlike the majority of Bahrainis, is Sunni. The demonstrators preached unity between Sunni and Shiite, and Sunnis were in attendance at Sitra, but the inequality of the two sects weighs heavily in the demands and anger of the crowd. “The police will not be able to bring out the will of the people,” the speaker said.

A Sunni protester, Khalil Al Hasan, carrying the Bahraini flag, cursed what he considered the government’s paranoid fear that Shiites will take over the regime. “We are all citizens. We all need the same thing. There are poor Sunnis, just like there are poor Shiites,” he said. “We don’t want the King because he lied to us in 2002. He said a house for each citizen—that might mean a grave, maybe.” Protesters gathered, sharing their stories about the violent clashes and rumored political struggles, emphasizing the stranglehold that they believed the Prime Minister had over the royal family. Many blamed the Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior for Thursday night’s violence. As men carried the crying brother of Ali Mansour Khudair to the grave site, protesters screamed, “It was a bloody crackdown.”

Once the truck stopped, silence fell on the crowd, with only remnants of the mourners’ cries. Then the three men on the truck lifted the wooden box carrying Khudair’s body as a swarm of people lunged into the center to help carry him to his grave.